Death of a Foul Ball
How close it comes
A boy in my daughter’s fourth grade class once said:
“I died. I really died.”
His name was Harley, and he never finished his story. He moved away a year later. I wonder…
But his “death” made me remember.
At a Birmingham A’s minor league baseball game in old Rickwood Field with my dad, circa 1966, I watched a foul liner screaming in our direction along the first base line. In two seconds, I realized that its target was my face. My dad yelled, but I couldn’t move. I saw the green and white stands, the ball moving from back to foreground, with all else sitting still.
And then, in front of me and out of nowhere, a bald man’s meaty hands rose, and the ball smacked into them, killing it, instead of me.
I don’t remember who won that game, or if we ever thanked that bald-headed man.
Near-death is like that: a presence, and an almost absence.
But I wish I had that ball.
I might have given it to Harley — a token of our near deaths; a memento of our connected lives.
